You remember the $600 toilet seat. How could you forget? Back in the 1980s, reporters, cartoonists, and comedians relished the revelation that the Pentagon paid that much for an everyday object you could supposedly pick up for a few bucks at the hardware store.

There’s a reasonable explanation for the staggering cost of those particular toilet seats, but reporting that would’ve thrown an equally mundane wrench into the liberal elites’ perpetual self-congratulation machine. That’s why the media has never gotten the hang of putting those toilet seats down.

These jokers and journalists didn’t really care about this diarrheic waste of taxpayer dollars. They loved big government. They merely hated the military and wanted to prick its machismo. What’s changed since then is that a few of the “wrong” people got into the news racket. They, too, enjoy gloating over bizarre budgetary line items. Fox News crows about “$16 muffins” and other bloated expenditures that they feel embody effete bicoastal impotence, be it symbolic—those (also exaggerated) “$16 muffins”—or literal. Like penis pumps.

Behold your tax dollars at play:

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001.

The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period, from a low of $11 million in 2001 to a high of more than $47 million in 2010

I was blessedly unfamiliar with penis pumps until last year, when the (straight Jewish) client of my (gay Muslim) client turned out to be an inventor of penis hats. I don’t mean penis-shaped hats for your head. I mean miniature top hats and fezzes and Viking helmets that a guy can wear on his penis. For some reason. (The gay Muslim’s mom, an imam, even sewed the tiny bells on the jester’s caps. Just another day in multicultural Toronto.)

I decided to immerse myself in everything penile, the better to promote our product to adult-novelty distributors and Japanese penis-festival devotees—whose cult is looking better all the time.